A Defense of Ardor Page 4
I don’t want to enlist in the ranks of those poets who praise poetry so passionately as to negate the worth of every other form of communication. The great, lamented Joseph Brodsky even said that anyone who follows traffic laws has clearly read poetry beforehand; aesthetics preceded ethics for Brodsky. But when I watch classic films—my wife and I just watched Marcel Carné’s legendary film Quai des brumes (1938), which Vichy propaganda accused of demoralizing France and thus leading to the defeat of 1940!—I feel moved and bored simultaneously. Film ages far more quickly than the other arts. The “world’s eye” of any given time reaches its apogee in film. The styles of watching, walking, and filming, the camera angles, the fashions (clothes, makeup, smiles, gestures, anger, and affection): all these tiny “contemporaneities” change every eight or ten years. Unlike the realist novel, poetry largely ignores them, but they take up permanent residence in films, which fade like aging photographs. Poetry is among the arts that fade the least.
I know that such ideas may seem laughable. Hollywood releases new films every minute, new Titanics, which, unlike the original, navigate screen seas successfully, garnering billions of dollars in the process. We hear nothing (or even less than nothing) about poets, though, and one of these nonentities dares to doubt the durability of the dream factory’s productions!
A poet—less than nothing! In his essay “Der Dichter und seine Zeit,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal compares the poet to the medieval saint Alexis, and the comparison only grows apter with time.
Does he not resemble that princely pilgrim of the old legend, who was commanded to abandon his princely home and wife and family and set out for the Holy Land; he returned thence, but before he crossed the threshold he was bidden to enter his own home disguised as a beggar known to no one, and he took up his abode where the servants ruled. The servants ordered him to take his place beneath the stairs, where the dogs were kept at night. And there he lives and sees his wife, brothers and children as they climb and descend the stairs, and he hears how they speak of him as lost or even dead and he thus discovers how they mourn for him. But he has been commanded not to let himself be known, and so he lives on unrecognized in his very home … For thus it is given that the master of the house shall not master his own possessions—for does the master of the house possess the dark that fills his halls at night, does he possess the cook’s insolence, the stable boy’s conceit, the sighing of the meekest serving girl? But he who dwells in darkness like a spirit shall own all!
I don’t know if the Polish poet Kazimiera Illakowiczowna was responding to Hofmannsthal’s essay when she wrote a poem in which St. Alexis’s unhappy wife bemoans God’s stern sentence; she is, after all, the victim of this pious experiment. Unlike her husband, who basks in reality’s shadow, she owns neither day nor night, neither drawing rooms nor dusky halls. Her lot is sorrow and distress; and her monologue is a lament for a wasted life. I’d like to hear the same kind of lament issuing from the modern world, a world divorced from poetry and given over to the Internet and ads.
When we open the paper, though, we generally find a splendid catalogue of temporary things (unless it’s an unusually historic day: the liberation of Paris, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the death of Napoleon). If we read very carefully, we may be able to recall the name of the UN secretary-general. Such things change quickly. The Politburo of a certain totalitarian party has ceased to exist, and today’s children will never know how sinister the word itself once was, how people feared its “proceedings,” its “resolutions,” its “censures.” But where do we find what’s lasting? Where do the deathless things hide?
With their chins high, girls come back from the tennis courts.
The spray rainbows over the sloping lawns.
With short jerks a robin runs up, stands motionless.
The eucalyptus tree trunks glow in the light.
The oaks perfect the shadow of May leaves.
Only this. Only this is worthy of praise: the day.
(Czeslaw Milosz, from “Throughout Our Lands”)
Imperishable things drift through the air, mixed with what is passing; it’s someone’s job to sort them out.
But can we still write like Hölderlin, like Norwid, like Yeats, like Rilke, like Mandelstam, like Milosz, in a way that directs us to the world’s wholeness, to a world that holds divinity and pain, joy and despair—and not like a professional who’s mastered one subject perfectly and is interested in only one thing, be it language, politics, or acacia blossoms? Must we become deft miniaturists with a single theme? And what should the high style be today? Almost certainly not hieratic utterances, in the manner of Claudel or Saint-John Perse. They are wonderful poets, but they lack a sense of humor; and a high style unaccompanied by a sense of humor—a sense of humor brimming with forbearance for our cruel, comic, and imperfect world—would become a chilly mausoleum. It would be like those quarries outside Tuscan Carrara from which the marble has been stripped, leaving only whiteness.
The high style grows from a ceaseless dialogue between two spheres, the spiritual realm whose guardians and creators are the dead (like Virgil in the Divine Comedy) and the domain of eternal praesens, our single, precious moment, the pocket of time in which we’ve chanced to live. The high style mediates between the spirits of the past and the stopgaps of the present; between Virgil and the young people wearing Walkmen as they rollerblade along Western Europe’s slick sidewalks; between poor, lonely Hölderlin and tipsy German tourists whooping it up along the narrow streets of Lucca; between the vertical and the horizontal.
But the problem is that the high style is not really a “middleman” by nature, like Hermes in ancient Greece or Thomas Mann in the twentieth century. The high style arises in response to final things. It is a reaction to mystery, to what is loftiest. But how does one mediate between what is high and what is flat? Surely the outcome of such a negotiation can only be a mathematical mean, a kind of measured leveling, a relative drop on the spirit’s stock market. No, this “mediation” must be very subtle. There can be no talk of simply seeking some happy mean between the great and small. The rigorous mediation I have in mind involves instead a certain discomfort with contemporary society; it deals with placement, incarnation; it requires the humor and the irony, painful at times, that keep one from slipping into scorn. The contemporary writer has his feet caught in the rather absurd and comfortable little world of consumer society. And not just his feet; he is stuck in this world up to his knees, even his waist. He’s been infected by the comic passions on which this little world thrives.
At the same time, though, thanks not only to his reading but to his moments of solitude, and to experiences of the kind that Freud (I should at least mention him once) called “oceanic,” the writer occasionally gains access to more serious realms of being. So perhaps the high style is not about mediation so much as about a certain kind of metaphysical modesty, about humor (anch’io sono consumatore), about learning to open up to the beautiful, the sublime. Nothing reactionary or ridiculous is required to achieve this; you don’t need to drape yourself in ancient tunics like Stefan George and his circle of acolytes, who, engulfed by the vulgarity of Wilhelmine Germany, performed Hellenic plays on the rooftops of apartment buildings.
Humor is crucial for the high style, since we must also understand that we will never completely succeed in tidying the world, even if the high style typically aspires to a highly ordered reality. We continue to desire the high style, we continue to require its presence—but we can no longer believe wholeheartedly that we’ll complete our exhaustive inventory of the cosmos.
Strong in reading, thought, and experience, but weak in practice; mired in modernity like Seamus Heaney’s mummies dredged up from ancient bogs; weak, too, like all modern men, in the mentality exposed by the theorists, the mentality of a “man without qualities”: the writer in search of “high style” does not cease to be an “everyman.” He is weak like everyone else; like everyone else he falls prey to the temptations of mi
ndless television and American movies. He knows full well the dreariness of highways and vacationing crowds. He is stronger perhaps only in his unflagging drive to seek out something higher, in his recollection of the sublime, which he refuses to write off as modernity’s loss (as his fellow travelers and beachside companions might see it).
Anyway, we’re not in danger of creating a high style that would arise chiefly or exclusively from a distaste for modernity. Precisely such a distaste for modernity defined the rhetorical choices of the great and less great writers in our not-so-distant past. This misadventure befell the generation of our grandfathers (Ernst Jünger, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Gottfried Benn, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Henry de Montherlant, Bertolt Brecht; with Yeats and T. S. Eliot in the place of honor). A generation of “violent writers” was repelled by the torpid, horizontal world of modern democracy, by a modern society governed not by kingly flourishes but by the shocks of the stock market and the tallies of parliament. They performed and promoted bold action, valiant deeds. They were knights, worshippers of corrida, warriors, noblemen, seducers, revolutionaries, nationalists, commissars. The deed—military, erotic, or aristocratic—was a metaphor, a pretext for high style, a rhetoric of ardent action whose goal was to throw off the modern world and recast it in a nobler alloy (though no one knew precisely what this better metal should be); it made no difference whether this better substance was forged on the left or the right, so long as it was radical. Recent European memory has been imprinted with the notion that high style must always be an instrument of reaction, a hammer smashed against modernity.
It is a misguided notion. We who as children played gleefully and from necessity among the ruins we inherited through the deeds of our valiant, eloquent forebears—not writers, needless to say, who, when they awakened from their youthful madness, rarely poked their heads from their vast studies—we’re skeptical of that rhetoric, that version of high style, that knowing air. We also realize that modernity can’t be fought (you won’t win), even if it needs chiding upon occasion, even if one of its less intelligent faces repels us. Modernity must be improved, expanded, enhanced, enriched; we must speak to it. Modernity resides within us; it’s too late to attack it from the sidelines.
I’ve often wondered whether the marked composure of the present generation of writers, writers who no longer want to be knights or bold officers whose faces, etched in scars, draw soldiers into battle, or ruthless revolutionaries with exotic noms de guerre, stems from a deliberate choice, from the conscious acceptance of an inner sensitivity, or whether it is also a predictable reaction to a tiring excess of noisy rhetoric, a simple desire for change. To put it differently, do we prefer Vermeer to Rubens because we’ve carefully compared the value of contemplation to the value of (dubious) radical action? Or are we governed simply by fashion, public sentiment, by what other people think? Does wisdom guide us, or mere conformism? This last possibility would force us to take a pessimistic view of literature’s future (and other futures as well).
Several years ago the French minister of foreign affairs ironically chastised the French intellectuals who had violently attacked the sluggish European policy in Bosnia for not actually going to Bosnia to fight the aggressor as Malraux, Simone Weil, and so many others had done during the Spanish Civil War. He failed to consider the change of generations, the altered attitudes. Those who cherish the dialogical principle and the murmur of laptop computers are not likely to take up arms on the battlefield. For that you need a generation of adventurers like our grandfathers.
High style need no longer stem from a dislike of modernity. But low style—ironic, colloquial, flat, small, minimal—may arise precisely from ressentiment, from a rejection of our silver-tongued forebears. Perhaps not everywhere, in all linguistic spheres. Certainly those who read German may have received the impression more than once that there exists to this day a prohibition on “sublimity” and “metaphysics” in German literature, as if everything higher, bolder, unironically intellectual must be linked by necessity to a pernicious past, thus leading—yes!—onto politically treacherous, fascist territory.
Thus the contemporary writer stumbles upon a problem basic to any artistic creation. Do we concede, in democracy’s exceedingly sober spirit, that we make our pronouncements in an empty room, that we draw exclusively upon ourselves, our own spiritual lives, our own mentality, as we confess our venal sins and minor revelations; or, as antiquity and the Middle Ages believed, and as the Romantics still hoped, subject to the more or less visible authority of a truth residing somewhere outside our own skulls?
It’s a difficult question. No one would want to relinquish the freedom we achieved through the European revolts against churchly authority. In acknowledging the invisible authority of a truth beyond ourselves, wouldn’t we inevitably be squandering three hundred years of hard-won European emancipation, the emancipation of citizens, of individuals, of men and women? Anyway, we can neither discard the Enlightenment nor erase it from our history. I’ve already mentioned the essayist Jerzy Stempowski. In his book Terre bernoise he writes about the trees of central Switzerland. He comments that in the eighteenth century, linden trees, which are consecrated to love and Venus, began to be planted at the spot where the local gallows had stood (on the outskirts, the Galgenberg) in virtually every village. Anyone who has longed in a fit of rage to expunge the Enlightenment from our past would do well to remember the lindens, those lovely trees with the intoxicating scent (it’s no accident that they were linked to Venus), that took the place of the gallows’ dry wood so recently—not much over two hundred years ago. The trees would almost certainly not be here today if it weren’t for the fussy eighteenth century and its wigs.
There can be no question of a “return” to some rigorously ordered “medieval” transcendence. Eliot’s late directives advising poets to subject themselves to an impersonal discipline and to enroll in the ranks of a higher spiritual order, the order of caritas, seem pedantic: they reek of the church vestibule. And yet the intuition of which artists often speak, the power that permits an artist to formulate a poem’s most pointed words or a sonata’s most crucial notes, still deserves our best attention. Maybe we’re not altogether alone in our empty room, in our workshop: if so many writers love solitude it may be because they’re not really all that lonely. There really is a higher voice that sometimes—too rarely—speaks. We catch it only in the moments of our greatest concentration. This voice may only speak once, it may make itself heard only after long years of waiting: still, it changes everything. For it means that the freedom we cherish, the freedom we seek, is not our only treasure. The voice we sometimes hear does not deprive us of our liberty; it demonstrates only that this freedom has its limits, that emancipation can take us only so far.
For this reason, I’m stubbornly prepared to defend the notion of “inspiration,” the notion Paul Valéry, that great professor of poetry, treated so contemptuously. Inspiration doesn’t absolve anyone from exacting labor and strict discipline; but inspiration—which differs for every artist and assumes new guises every time, guises unified only by the Muse’s familiar form—is what guides us toward that voice. (The Muse survives today only in humorous forms, but she once provoked complex emotions. Robert Graves notes that the Muse aroused feelings ranging from ecstasy to revulsion, powerfully religious feelings.) Inspiration is short-lived, of course—but its fleeting presence is important, it cleanses something in us, it opens us to that voice which we understand so poorly, but whose absence would leave us little wiser than any of the other mammals.
The English language has a very useful word, “cant,” meaning humbug, high-flown lying, rhetoric. I think that everyone who speaks of high style today must bear in mind the countless rhetorical possibilities for its abuse, the new variants of cant that range from odes to Stalin and other tyrants to the thousands of wretched amateur verses singing the praises of flowers or naively lauding a naive God. We cannot escape retracing Bertolt B
recht’s path, his class-based suspicion of Parnassian poetasting—but we can’t rid ourselves of skepticism toward facile pathos so easily. Every era needs its own diction; anyone who praises high style by means of anachronistic, Symbolist syntax—or Victorian syntax in the Anglo-American context—courts ridicule. We’ve also learned to marvel at details, the concrete; high diction today must preserve this form of revelation and not seek refuge in lofty clichés.
A stirring passage from Aleksander Wat’s memoirs comes to mind. The memoirs were taped as Wat told the story of his life to Czeslaw Milosz, and they were published many years after Wat’s death under the title My Age. As a young poet, Wat was much taken with Dadaism: linguistic experimentation, a playful critique of language as such enthralled him. He speaks to Milosz about the change of heart he experienced in a Moscow prison, the Lubyanka (a prison from which very few emerged alive, and survivors were packed off to Siberia). There he understood that the language entrusted to a poet is extraordinarily precious and fragile, and in grave peril; and the poet’s task is to nurture this language, not to mock it. This prison anecdote, so well known to Polish readers and critics, has symbolic significance. It points to a watershed between two currents in twentieth-century poetry; and it places this turning point on the map. Critics seldom mention these two currents; they’re preoccupied with other, less obvious aesthetic phenomena. The first of these two trends is critical, avant-garde, analytic, and suspicious. The second, which draws far fewer followers, is more constructive than destructive, more ecstatic than sardonic. It seeks out what is hidden. The Lubyanka must have been the best possible place for such reflections.